Force of Nature- The Life of Linus Pauling

by Thomas Hager

  Ava Helen felt it her duty to free as much of her husband's time as possible for work. She relieved him of home pressures, did all the cooking, kept the children away from him, handled all the details of family life to give him the time he needed. It was a domestic arrangement in keeping with the times, but it was also a conscious decision made by an intelligent woman. "A scientist, in order to be doing his work, must really be thinking about it all the time," Ava Helen said later. "Very often he doesn't want to be interrupted in that thinking. The wives of scientists are really . . . fuddy-duddy. They have to be women who are not expecting anything. You see, they don't need to be taken to the theater; they don't need to be taken out to dinner. . . . They have to have their own ability to entertain themselves and to perhaps see more deeply or understand what is really worthwhile in life."

  There was a slight edge of resentment there, against the daily, almost complete separation from her husband, the creation of parallel lives that rarely touched, the sense of living in Linus's shadow. Ava Helen felt that she was Pauling's equal in most things; she, too, had a strong ego and a desire to be recognized. She loved her children; she was, her husband remembered, an "outstandingly able, excellent cook" and enjoyed the limited amount of entertaining they did at home.

  But home life, she found, was not enough for her. She would not become "fuddy-duddy." Ava Helen was restless and interested in broader issues; she read widely and thought about national and international issues. Through the 1930s the liberal-leftist thinking that had been part of her upbringing as a child grew into a renewed interest in politics and social action.

  When they were first married, Ava Helen did not talk politics with her husband, who had unreflectingly carried on the Republican Party affiliation of his father. In his first two presidential elections Pauling voted for Herbert Hoover. But as the Depression went on, Ava Helen became an increasingly committed New Dealer, vocally supportive of Roosevelt and his government plans for helping the poor.

  She could no longer talk science very effectively with Pauling, but she could talk politics. And she soon began making an impression. "I began listening to what she was saying about the difference between the rich and the poor, the capitalists and the workers," Pauling said.

  "The Democratic Party seemed pretty clearly to correspond somewhat more closely to what I thought was right than the Republican Party." With Ava Helen's urging, Pauling switched parties, and more. Once he began to think about it, be began to see things as she saw them. The deepening economic crisis and the social unrest it engendered seemed to offer proof of the bankruptcy of capitalism. California was awash in jobless migrants and protest politics, and Pauling began listening to the complaints. By 1934, Ava Helen's influence had become so decisive that he voted for a socialist democrat, Upton Sinclair, for governor of California. From then on, he was a committed Roosevelt Democrat.

  A Laboratory for Paradise

  Pauling's new politics was at variance with the atmosphere at Caltech. Most scientists considered politics a messy, judgmental, value-laden minefield that anyone aspiring to objectivity should avoid, but there was a political element built into the structure of Caltech. It was exemplified by the school's leader, Robert Millikan, who thought the New Deal was left-wing paternalism that would rot the nation's self-reliance and that the Depression was a temporary jam in the social machinery, with the major effect of making it harder for scientists to create more wealth. He wasted little sympathy on those who could not find work. "Call unemployment leisure," he said, "and one can at once see the possibilities."

  Millikan would have a major effect on Caltech, the institution that shaped Pauling's professional life. The son of an Iowa Congregational minister, a brilliant experimentalist and able administrator, he directed Caltech for more than a quarter of a century, building it from a promising school to one of the nation's major academic centers. To the outside world, Millikan was Caltech—"Millikan's School," some called it. And he was much more. For a period following his 1923 Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also the American public's image of a scientist. He had the strong-jawed, silver-haired good looks of "a witty and respected banker," as Time magazine described him in a 1927 cover story, the smooth delivery of a born hawker, and the soul of a middle-class technocrat. Millikan didn't talk science, he preached it, on radio, at Rotary Club lunches, in popular magazine articles, and at flower society meetings. He was one of the few scientists who publicly proclaimed his belief in God, proudly pointed out the links between science and capitalist economic development, and enjoyed talking people out of money to fund research. He exemplified the new breed of scientist/bureaucrat who would become increasingly important in academia and government through the middle of the twentieth century. And his message was simple: "The supreme question for all mankind," he said, "is how it can best stimulate and accelerate the application of the scientific method to all departments of human life."

  This was a message eagerly absorbed by his favorite congregation, Southern California's banking, mercantile, industrial, and professional elite. Hale had started Caltech with the support of these wealthy donors, and Millikan made sure that support not only continued but increased manyfold. He was a master money raiser, and he did it by playing off his target audiences' pride, greed, vanity, and even racism. Southern California, he said, was the meeting place of God, physics, and manifest destiny, a promised land, geographically, climatically, and demographically suited to become the great crucible in which scientific progress, business acumen, and Christian values would combine to solve current ills and meet future challenges. "California marks now, as England did three centuries ago, the furthest western outpost of Aryan civilization," Millikan told potential donors. It was here that Western white culture would interface profitably with the growing economies of the Orient. It was here that great industries would rise and the desert would be made to bloom. Caltech, he believed, was the laboratory for paradise.

  Millikan was a master at conjuring up compelling, albeit vague, visions of the connection between pure research and industrial profit. Without promising a single specific result in return, he could make wealthy donors feel as if a gift to Caltech were a prudent investment in the economic future of the region. They heeded his sermon. A position on the Caltech board of trustees became a badge of honor for some of the region's wealthiest men, and through the 1920s money poured in.

  Caltech's corporate-style administrative structure codified this marriage of science and business. Millikan refused the standard academic title of president when he arrived, insisting instead that the school be run by an executive group, comprised equally of businessmen and faculty members. His would be a school led not by a president but by the more businesslike title he gave himself, executive director. Younger faculty more often called him by his nickname, the Chief. The school's academic divisions were each guided by councils in which full professors had votes equal to the division heads. Duties within the divisions were overseen by faculty committees. The consciously corporate structuring played down strong central leadership and emphasized group achievement. The business community loved it.

  They also liked the positive press the Chief was adept at securing. In 1932 publisher Henry Luce thought the wider business community would be interested in learning about Caltech and asked Millikan to send him some information for a Fortune article. Press releases were not good enough for Millikan. "My reply to him was that. . . the thing to do was to send somebody out here to live for a time," he remembered. Luce sent out one of his best reporters—soon to become an editor of Fortune—and the Chief put him up at the faculty club for a month and a half. Millikan's weeks of working directly with the writer paid off. When an article on the wonders of Caltech appeared in July 1932, it was more than a puff piece; it was a multipart, four-color paean to scientific progress. Caltech was a "temple to . . . science reared by the rich men of business. . . . The history of Athens and Carthage, of Alexandria and Angkor, of Rome and Paris, of Chartres and London is si
mply repeating itself on the flatland under Mt. Wilson. . . . The institute is daring. It greets the stranger with an air of success and affluence. It is bold, in the manner of the West. It knocks brazenly on the door of the universe, like the theme in Beethoven's famous quartet." Pauling was mentioned in passing as the man "whose work on the structures of crystals and molecules earned him the Langmuir Prize last year as the nation's most brilliant young chemist."

  During the Depression, on the side of a steam shovel at Caltech, a religious graffiti artist scrawled: "Jesus Saves." Beneath it, someone chalked: "But Millikan Gets Credit."

  - - -

  Yet even Millikan could not save Caltech from the Depression. As interest rates plummeted, the money generated by the institute's investments shrank; its stocks and securities melted to half their value. The evaporation of the single largest component of Caltech's private income, a huge trust fund from lumber tycoon Arthur Fleming, sent shock waves through the administration. By 1932 the school was running a deficit of $80,000. Almost all construction was halted, including a planned addition to Noyes's chemistry building. Research and travel moneys vanished, and Millikan asked all faculty members to accept a 10 percent pay cut. Pauling took the cut, lost much of the $4,500 he had been receiving from the institute each year to support his research, and gave up five hundred dollars he had been promised each year for travel.

  But he did not suffer these cuts gladly. Pauling, deeply involved in his work and desperately in need of space for his fast-growing research group, had neither the time nor the inclination to sympathize with the budget problems faced by his higher-ups. He argued against the pay cut, refused to volunteer to give up his travel money when asked, and made it clear that he was displeased with his shrinking research support. Noyes, Millikan, and Hale struggled to keep him happy. For a time, Hale and some other trustees donated money out of their own pockets to support Pauling's research, and when construction of the new chemistry wing was delayed, rooms were found in Hale's new astrophysics building to allow for the expansion of his laboratories.

  Millikan redoubled his fund-raising efforts with his large group of corporate friends, but the Depression was drying up his usual watering holes. There was little money available from the government and Millikan did not believe that scientists in any case should feed at the public trough.

  But one other major source of funds was available—money that would help keep Caltech going through the Depression and would change the course of Pauling's career.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Science of Man

  Big Money

  John D. Rockefeller, Sr., had a problem. The crude that came out of his huge Lima, Ohio, oil fields was laced with so much sulfur it smelled like rotten eggs. People called it skunk juice and refused to buy it. His refineries could not purify the stink away. Rockefeller was left with thousands of barrels of stuff he could not sell.

  When a group of eager chemical engineers at one of his Indiana plants asked for money to figure out a way to remove the smell, Rockefeller, disinclined to throw good money after bad, turned them down. But a few of them kept working on the problem on their own time and in 1913 succeeded in finding a way of chemically "cracking" the crude, a new refining process that got out the skunk and doubled the yield of gasoline. When he saw the results, Rockefeller had an epiphany. Almost overnight, he became a firm supporter of science.

  In later years, as the aging industrialist pondered how to dispense the great wealth he had gathered, he would see to it that the aims and methods of science suffused the huge philanthropic foundations he set up. A pragmatist as well as a Christian, Rockefeller did not want to use his money to create charities to coddle those with problems; he wanted to find the causes of problems and eliminate them. He wanted results from his investment in the betterment of mankind, and science was the era's surest path to results.

  During the 1920s, under the management of philosophy-professor-turned-science-enthusiast Wickliffe Rose, the Rockefeller philanthropies began the large-scale support of pure science. Rose's single biggest grant was to Caltech, for Hale's Palomar telescope, one of many large sums of Rockefeller money that came to the school in the 1920s. Large lump sums were the preferred type of grant under Rose, and Caltech was a favored recipient because it was Rose's belief—as it was that of most scientists—that the best research was done by a few top men at elite institutions and that scientists themselves were better suited than foundation-funding officers to determine the disposition of money for specific projects. Rose's method was to identify the worthiest centers of basic research, give them sizable chunks of money with few strings attached, and allow the scientists themselves to figure out how to spend it. There was a great deal of money to give away. By 1932, Rockefeller philanthropies alone were providing six times as much money for academic science in the United States as the total endowment for science had been at the turn of the century. Rose had become "central banker to the world of science," as the science historian Daniel Kevles put it, and his pet phrase "Make the peaks higher" became the foundation's unofficial motto.

  Fueled by Rockefeller and Carnegie grants and the money that flowed from private donors, the 1920s became a period of enormous expansion for private scientific centers like Caltech, MIT, Columbia, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins—not to mention the academic and research institutions Rockefeller's money started from scratch, the University of Chicago and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City. And it was not only the infrastructure, the buildings and laboratories, that grew. A network of power and influence was also expanding. Alliances formed between government, industry, and academic science during World War I—exemplified by Hale and Millikan's National Research Council (NRC)—were continued through the 1920s in the form of a growing scientific "establishment," a professional and social interweaving of men of power: university leaders, businessmen, government officials, heads of philanthropic foundations and their wealthy boards, and the presidents of such scientific organizations as the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. They talked to each other at professional meetings, had dinner at each other's clubs, gave each other advice, funneled each other funds, nominated each other for high positions, and together determined the scientific agenda of the period between the world wars.

  The system worked to Caltech's advantage. For example, Hale, Noyes, and Millikan, all NRC organizers, were also perennial forces in the NAS. When the Carnegie Institution—the foundation that had funded Hale's Mount Wilson Observatory—began looking for a new president in 1919, Hale and Noyes made sure their mutual friend and former NRC director John C. Merriam was nominated for the post. As Noyes pointed out to Hale, "The result of this arrangement would be that you, he, and I would together largely determine the policies of the Carnegie Institution." After Merriam was named to the position, Noyes had no trouble securing Carnegie money: $200,000 for various chemical research projects through the 1920s—one-third of the chemistry division's total annual expenditures. Some of the money supported Pauling's early work.

  It was no wonder that the acerbic editor of Science magazine during the period, James Cattell, compared the difficulty in untangling these relationships to the famous astronomical conundrum of determining planetary involvement when several celestial bodies are involved. "Whether the Research Council belongs to the National Academy, or the National Academy belongs to the Research Council, or both are satellites of Pasadena is a problem of three bodies that is difficult of solution. . . . The Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Research Council are another problem of three bodies."

  - - -

  By the end of the 1920s, funding from private philanthropies had become vital to Caltech—accounting for twenty cents of every dollar of total assets—and much of it was coming from the Rockefeller Foundation.

  Noyes, adept at getting Carnegie money for his physical chemistry projects, targeted the Rockefeller Foundation for a maj
or expansion of organic chemistry. This was a weak point at Caltech. The only organic chemist in Noyes's division was a holdover from the Throop days named Howard Lucas, a man Noyes considered less than stellar. But to Noyes, organic chemistry—the study of the carbon-based compounds, the molecules of life—was the cornerstone that needed to be laid before he could build other areas in which he had long been interested: biochemistry and medical research. Noyes had come to believe that this was the next great step for his branch of science, a move into crossover areas where chemistry could help revolutionize biology, just as Noyes had helped physics revolutionize chemistry. As early as 1922 he had okayed a pilot project to produce insulin at Caltech and then expanded it with Carnegie money during the next few years; he even gave thought to building a research-oriented medical school at Caltech.

  But the first step was organic chemistry. Here he wanted to find a new man, a scientific star with international fame around whom an entire research group could revolve, and he went searching for money to make it happen. Noyes talked the Rockefeller Foundation out of a large grant in the mid-1920s that included money to hire a new organic chemist but then could not find anyone to fill the position. Organic chemistry was a European, especially German, specialty, and it was difficult to find any top-flight American researchers. James Bryant Conant was the number-one man in the United States, but after visiting Caltech for two months in 1927, he accepted a Harvard counteroffer. Then Noyes's health began to decline, and he put his energy elsewhere. The job was still vacant in 1930 when the Rockefeller Foundation gave Caltech another huge grant: half a million dollars, with a pledge of that much more for the development of the natural sciences, including funds to begin plans for a new organic chemistry wing on the Gates Laboratory.